Despite all the talk about the recovery of the economy, the jobs have not returned, and those who still have jobs are still haunted by the threat of unemployment.

The political sham

Meanwhile, the ongoing political drama on Capitol Hill over the extension of unemployment benefits looks more and more like a daytime soap-opera. The delay in the Senate in late February over the extension of unemployment benefits led to a temporary lapse in benefits for close to one million people. There's lots of bickering with the major capitalist parties blocking each other's measures, while painting their opponents as inconsiderate, out-of-touch, or incompetent.

These back-and-forth battles serve a number of objectives for the ruling class. When the Democrats blame the Republicans for failing to extend unemployment benefits the aim is to present the state as the ultimate social guardian, the lie that the state cares for the needy and protects its citizens. But the very nature of these extensions is that they are only happening one month at a time, constantly keeping the unemployed waiting, worrying, dependent, and always on the verge of total destitution. Despite the claims of "concern" these measures aim to maintain the feeling of helplessness and powerless among the unemployed which is already created by the frustratingly complex and humiliating processes of applying for and collecting these benefits in the first place.

This feeling of powerlessness is reinforced by the mechanism of the unemployment benefits system itself, whereby each unemployed worker relates to the state as an isolated individual - a needy person asking for help - powerless to do anything but beg. But where the individual can feel lost the working class has the capacity to collectively confront the state.

The Republicans, on the other hand speak the language of "fiscal responsibility" to try and reinforce the stereotype of the unemployed not trying hard enough, and being a drain on the national economy. This propaganda tries to mask the real extent of capitalism's crisis as well as undermine the real solidarity those in work feel for those who are unemployed.

Yet when workers see the petty squabbling between the parties it's not taken as proof that one or the other is uncaring or incompetent, but that the state in general, does not care about unemployment. And the idea that the unemployed are undeserving wears thin when more than 1 in 6 people in the US are either out of work or working part-time because they cannot find jobs, and when every worker knows that he or she could be laid off at a moment's notice, like so many others already have been.

A deepening catastrophe

The official unemployment rate in the United States for March was already 10.2%, but if we count those who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, this number is raised to 11.5%, and if we add workers who are employed part-time because they can't find full-time work, the number is 17.5% of the civilian population. [1] On top of that this final figure doesn't say anything about the number of workers who've entered the military due to difficulty in finding work, nor does it count those among the chronically unemployed who have turned to crime and are serving prison sentences. A 2009 study from Rutgers University estimated that only 43% of the unemployed are actually collecting benefits.[2]

Among those who do receive benefits, the average length of their unemployment, as of February 2010, was 29.7 weeks (30.2 in January), with 41.2% of those receiving benefits already past the normal benefit period and into emergency benefits. These figures are the highest on record.[3] A recent statement from Goldman Sachs estimates that in the coming months as many as 400,000 people will lose their benefits. Paying out at an average of $1200 a month per person this means roughly $0.5 billion lost in monthly compensation for these workers, which, in turn, presents major problems for the US economy as it reduces potential consumer spending.[4] With less benefit payments in circulation, unemployed workers will have to cut their spending, thus leading to further economic woes as US consumers will be providing an even less adequate market for commodities produced.

As an indicator of what capitalism has to offer to the working class, unemployment expresses the grim truth of capitalism's dead end very clearly. The crisis of unemployment in many ways expresses the central historic crisis of capitalism: overproduction. Capitalism can only continue its cycle of reproduction at the cost of excluding ever greater numbers of producers from the process of production and thus of their means of earning a livelihood.

But, from the point of view of the exploited working class the phenomenon of mass unemployment can act as a powerful stimulant to the development of class consciousness.

How can unemployed workers fight back?

At first, layoffs and unemployment present a very significant obstacle to the class struggle. The bourgeoisie still try to use the unemployed as blackmail against those who are still working to keep them from struggling. And in addition to having to beg to the state and being made to wait on the mercies of the bourgeoisie for another month's rent, unemployed workers may also feel powerless without the weapon of the strike. But, while the unemployed can't strike, they are still part of the working class, and the struggle of unemployed workers is at its strongest when they see themselves as a part of the wider struggle of the working class as a whole. As the ICC wrote in 1978:

"The struggle of the class for wages isn't a sum of struggles by each worker against his individual exploitation, but a general struggle against capital's exploitation of the labor power of the whole working class. The struggle of the unemployed against miserable unemployment pay or rents or social services (gas, electricity, transport etc) has the same basic nature as the struggle for wages. Although it's true that this doesn't immediately show itself in a clear way, it is still based on the global struggle against the extraction of immediate or past, direct or indirect, surplus value which the working class has suffered and continues to suffer. (...) It is not true that the unemployed workers can only participate in the class struggle by taking part in or supporting the workers at work (solidarity with and support for strikes). It is by directly defending themselves tooth and nail against the conditions capital imposes on them, in the place it makes them occupy, that the unemployed workers make their struggle an integral part of the general struggle of the working class against capital, and as such this struggle has to be supported by the entire class." (International Review 14 [1])

If we look to the struggles of the unemployed in the United States in the 1930s, we can see that the unemployed can struggle on a mass basis to fight the state for their interests as part of the working class, even in the darkest periods of counter-revolution. In the first years of the Great Depression, unemployed councils were organized in the neighborhoods of Harlem and the Lower East Side of New York City, which occupied relief offices en masse, stormed City Hall, engaged in demonstrations, and opposed evictions and other attacks with the force of numbers and resolute class violence. Before long, similar loose organizations of the unemployed sprang up all over the country.

The tactics used were in the beginning very effective and entirely on a class terrain. One of the most dramatic ways the unemployed resisted attacks was during evictions. Someone in the neighborhood would hear of a neighbor being evicted for not paying rent and would run down to where the unemployed council met to get everyone to rush to the evictee's apartment. Along the way they would meet others and explain the situation and by the time they would arrive at the apartment, there could be one or two hundred unemployed workers standing outside, opposed to maybe ten police marshals who were moving the furniture out. The crowd would surround them and either fight them to prevent them moving the furniture, or would simply begin putting the furniture back in the home.

Unemployed workers would also storm charities and relief offices with large crowds demanding funds and financial help to pay for rent, groceries, etc., refusing to leave until these payments were made. Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's book Poor People's Movements: Why they Succeed and How they Fail describes these tactics of disruption and direct class violence in more detail and demonstrates that they often yielded results. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais' Labor's Untold Story for example, claims that strongarm tactics against evictions restored 77,000 evicted families to their homes in New York City alone. Despite being cut off from the point of production, unemployed workers were still able to force the bourgeoisie to back off.

However, the political climate of the 1930s was very disorientating. The Communist Parties everywhere promoted the reactionary idea of "Socialism in one country" with reference to Russia, and, with the Popular Front in Europe and support for the New Deal in the US, showed their support for the national capital everywhere. This led to great confusion even among genuinely revolutionary elements, as the Communist Parties became more and more actively counter-revolutionary.

Most of the unemployed councils in the US had a core of Communist Party members but were not really permanent organs for reform. They were small groups of workers who were able to draw others into sporadic defensive struggles as they erupted. Yet most of the Stalinized Communists were not happy with this. They wanted a permanent, mass, reform organization for the unemployed, and began to form an organization for more "disciplined" and "systematic" campaigns for electoral "pressure" to win things for the unemployed. Portraying the New Deal as a great working-class reform, they directed their energies toward building a voting bloc, lobbying "progressive" Democrats in government. This is how the Communist Party sabotaged the movement. Local initiative vanished, the disruptive tactics were suppressed in order to be diverted into electoral politics, and many of the Communist Party members were eventually recruited into working for the new social welfare programs the state undertook - directly administering the state's austerity in the vain hopes that they could do this "for the unemployed."

Additionally, the general attitude of the working class in the 1930s around the world was profoundly marked by the defeat of the revolutionary attempts of 1917-1923. After the defeat of its most important struggles - and the murder, disintegration, or betrayal of the most influential revolutionaries and militant workers - the working class was profoundly disoriented around the world. Seeing no possibility of another revolutionary offensive against the bourgeois order, the working class was dragooned into the arms of the state.

The US government was able to isolate and compartmentalize the working class by treating the unemployed, those employed by the new Works Progress Administration, and those in regular employment as separate categories. The state also related to workers as individuals through the new administrations set up in the New Deal, thus fragmenting the class into a mass of separate citizens, each relating to the state as only one person asking for assistance, rather than as a class confronting the state with demands. The state was able to pass itself off as the guarantor of social solidarity and savior of the needy with unemployment insurance programs, social security, public works programs, and other measures. All these were, of course, financed with taxes levied from those members of the working class still receiving an income at work. These measures didn't show the generosity of the ruling class. On the contrary the bourgeoisie was able to divide the workers still at work from the unemployed, demanding sacrifices from the former in the name of the latter.

Prospects for the future

These social spending programs were relatively new at the time, and therefore much more suited to disorienting a defeated working class. Today, in contrast, we are witnessing the unraveling of all the so-called "welfare state," public debts that would have been unthinkable to the engineers of the New Deal. More importantly, today the working class is willing to struggle and has not had a revolutionary attempt crushed for generations.

The state is exploiting notions of a kind of solidarity to push through austerity attacks (such as the recent healthcare reform), and there are still many illusions in the power of the state to resolve the crisis. However, given the massive nature of unemployment and the more and more obvious impasse of capitalism, the bourgeois state has great difficulties in selling the ideological campaign against the unemployed as being ‘lazy' and has not succeeded in dividing the class between employed and unemployed.

Of greatest importance is the growing force of the class struggle, both internationally and in the US. In recent years we have seen the massive struggle of students and workers against the CPE law in France in 2006. In the time since the crash kicked in there have been the struggles in December 2008 in Greece, and their continuing echo in 2010. There were the solidarity struggles in Britain in the winter and summer of 2009, and this winter the nation-wide struggle of the Tekel tobacco workers in Turkey, and closer to home the massive mobilization of students (predominantly working class) in California against the state's austerity measures. All these have shown that workers are not going to bow their heads and allow themselves to be sacrificed to pay for capitalism's crisis.

The struggles have shown  a strong tendency for inter-generational solidarity (something that workers unleashing struggles in the 60s and 70s often lacked), and, most recently, in Vigo, Spain we have seen a joint struggle of the unemployed and the employed in the shipyards.[5]

Laid-off workers in Vigo demonstrated outside the factory gates of the Bolsa shipyards against the deplorable conditions that foreign workers were living in and the shameful tactic of exploiting immigrant labor in particularly bad conditions in order to lay off workers whose salaries were deemed too costly for the company. Those laid-off made it clear that they were not against foreign workers or immigrant labor being used, but against the terrible conditions these workers lived in and that they were not hired under the previous agreement that had governed the living standards of workers in that industry. They brought a megaphone and invited the workers outside for a mass assembly calling on them to join in their struggle and a majority came out and marched with them all through the shipyards stopping work at all the major factories. These workers have shown the power that the working class has when it refuses to let itself be divided into the unemployed and the employed, or into foreign and native workers. With the solidarity of their unemployed comrades, the employed workers had the courage and strength to stop work and demand that the previous agreement be kept to, and the unemployed, rather than resigning themselves to their fate, were able to call on those at the point of production to further their struggle!

Unemployed workers can resist and fight back in their position as unemployed workers even without the strike weapon. But when they enlist the active solidarity of workers still at work, when they convince them to enter the struggle, they not only gain the advantage of disturbing the production process, but the very regroupment of workers as a class, both employed and unemployed, already implicitly poses a number of political questions about the bourgeois order, and terrifies the ruling class.

Capitalism uses unemployment and the threat of unemployment to blackmail, pacify, and discourage the working class from struggling. Everywhere the ruling class tries to tie the unemployed as individuals to the state and prevent their struggles from linking up with the rest of the working class, and tells the rest of the workers to "keep your head down, or it'll be you on the chopping block next."

Despite the traps of demoralization, the class struggle is strongest when the unemployed and the employed unite their struggles and overcome the obstacles the bourgeoisie puts in their way. Unemployed workers see that they have allies still at work and workers on the job know that they have allies in the streets that aren't tied to one particular workplace. The impulses of solidarity can help generalize the struggle throughout the whole working class, give it a political direction, and create a force that can take on the ruling class. Unemployment starts as a problem for the working class but can become a factor in the process that makes the working class a threat to capitalism.

Soyonstout 9/4/10

[1].- Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Table A-15. Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization."

[2].- John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. "The Anguish of Unemployment." September 2009.

[3].-  Michael A. Fletcher and Dana Hedgpeth "Are unemployment benefits no longer temporary?" Washington Post. March 9, 2010.

[4].- This report is available on several financial blogs, including ZeroHedge and the ShiftCTRL Group blog.

[5].-  See the ICC's article online at https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/3/vigo [2] for more details of this struggle

With great fanfare Mr. Obama on March 23 signed into federal law the health care reform legislation that the House had passed with a narrow majority two days before. News media sympathetic to the Democratic Party have hailed the new health care legislation as a "historical reform", a "towering achievement", a "landmark win for the American People" who are supposedly closer than ever to the promised land of guaranteed medical services. It has been a remarkable turn of events for a policy that seemed all but dead two months ago, when the Democratic Party lost its ability to pass legislation on a party line basis when it lost its supermajority in the Senate with the election of the Republican J. Brown following the death of Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy.

With the signing into law of the Democrat sponsored health care reform, a page has been turned on a highly charged political drama that has dominated US politics for many months. Yet the spectacle of bitter divisions between America's two main capitalist parties around the question of health care seems to be far from over. Already the Republican Party politicians and their supporters have ratcheted up their oppositional rhetoric, portraying the new bill as a "government health care takeover", an "assault on Americans individual freedoms" and vowing to repeal the new health care legislation. The stage is being set for a second act of vitriolic finger pointing and legalistic maneuvers while both parties fervently position themselves to use the health care issue to gain votes in the next Congressional mid-term elections. So, the circus is far from over!

Both sides are cynical liars

Throughout all these vicious factional ‘debates' within the ruling class, from left to right of the political spectrum, all politicians have a common message: they all want what is best for the nation, for society at large and for every individual of the American population. They all pretend that capitalism has a human face and that this system cares for the health and the well being of those that it exploits. Both sides are cynically exploiting for their own political ends, the very real dreadful  state in America of a great part of the medical services accessible to the working class and other strata of the population. Who are they kidding? It is obvious that in America as in any other country there are two health care systems, one for the ruling class and the well-to-do and other for the rest of society. It is true than in the worst-off capitalist countries medical services are practically nonexistent for the working masses, while, at the other extreme, most industrialized countries have a long-standing tradition of a more or less well developed health care system. However for decades now, world capitalism's worsening economic crisis has everywhere put medical services for the working class in the line of fire. The so-called "socialized" medicine under the centralized control of the national states that exists in one form or another throughout Europe is everywhere leaking water. As a result it is not hard at all for the self-interested defenders of the "American health care model" to point to horror stories from the "socialized" care systems. Nonetheless in America things are no better (in many important respects they are worse: according to OECD Health Data for 2004, the US spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care than other industrialized countries, yet has fewer doctors and nurses per 1000 inhabitants, lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality.)  The patchwork of government and privately controlled medical services (Medicare, Medicaid, employment based medical coverage....) that pass for health care system for the working class and the destitute, have  also been under attack for decades. In every industry that still offers medical insurance as part of the salary paid as "benefits", workers have been paying directly from their wages a growing part of their medical needs in the form of co-payments and direct contributions towards insurance premiums. The Medicare and Medicaid programs have been tweaked around in order to impose austerity measures by both Republican and Democratic administrations alike. In fact the American health care "model" competes very well on horror stories with its European counterparts and even compares badly to them in two points: It costs far more, yet still leaves 15% of the population (45 million people) without any permanent medical coverage.

Behind "Health Care Reform", Capitalism's economic interests

 Against the pile of lies of all the left and right wing politicians that pretend to be acting in the best interests of society as a whole, let's be clear that under capitalism there is nothing humanitarian in the way health care is provided for the working class. For capital, medical services are an expense, a part of the total cost of production and reproduction of the commodity labor power and as such subject to the laws of capitalist production. That in some countries the government runs a national health care system directly while in others like the US the state shares the field with the private sector does not in essence make any real difference. In the end, for capitalism as a whole the medical upkeep of the working class is an expense that the national state needs to control in an economically rational way in order to be able to compete in the world market. Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the first state health care was introduced in Germany in 1883 by the monarchist government of Otto von Bismarck essentially for two reasons: first, to increase workers' productivity, and second to stop workers from being attracted to the revolutionary politics of the Socialist Party.

The American bourgeoisie has recognized for years that the American health care system is expensive and inefficient, and, in the end, detrimental to the ability of the national capital to defend its interests in the world economy (to give just one example, in 2005 G Richard Wagoner, then the boss of General Motors, estimated that health benefits added $1,500 to the cost of every car built by GM). Only the right wing extremists in and out of the Republican Party, whose ideology blinds them to the interests of the national capital as a whole, can still defend the supposed virtues of the "American health care model". In fact the so-called health care reform legislation that the Democrats have managed to pass is driven not by altruism, but by the economic needs of American capitalism, and is by no means a "socialist" gift of the American government to the working class. Sure if all goes as planned more workers will have medical coverage as a result of this legislation - though by government calculations 13 million will still go without medical insurance - but this increase in the covered population will be financed in large part directly by the newly insured themselves, who will be obliged by law to buy their own medical insurance or pay a fine to the federal government.

Workers need to defend their own interests

From a working class perspective there is nothing to win in the "Health care reform". Besides the fact that the new legislation will eventually imposed an excise tax on the so-called "Cadillac plans" that still cover many workers, it will do nothing to address the main concerns today regarding their medical needs: the surging share of medical services that workers are obliged to pay from their own wages and the deteriorating quality of the health care that they receive. With the worsening of capitalism's economic crisis, the bosses will continue attacking working class living conditions as they try to make workers bear the brunt of its system collapse. These attacks will often come disguised as "reforms" - health care reform, immigration reform, social security reform... to make them more palatable to the working class. Workers will hear much about the need to oppose these "bad" policies in elections. However the response of the working class to these attacks can only be its intransigent independent collective struggle for the defense of its living conditions. It is only by developing this struggle at the point of production and the streets through the mass strike and its class independent organization (mass assemblies, strike committees...) uniting the unemployed and employed, that the working class can beat back capitalism's attacks. Against capitalism's drive to destroy humanity workers need to oppose their own revolutionary perspective.  Eduardo Smith 7/4/10

On March 4, 2010, following months of draconian budget cuts and furloughs in the higher education system throughout the United States, a national day of action was called by a variety of organizations across the political spectrum, including a number of leftist organizations, but also anarchists. The slogan adopted was "save education", a deceptive way of framing the issues at stake, as it is used to contain the student movement within the illusion of democratic reformism and also to characterize the cuts to public education as ‘particular' or unique, as if this was the only sector under attack. This is why there is often an improper framing of the question as being one based on a political emasculation of education. In fact, the crisis in education is a direct result of the deepening generalized crisis of capitalism and the student struggle needs to be understood in that context. The proper positioning of the student struggle in the larger class conflict is vital to understanding the dynamism of the struggle as capitalist contradictions are further exacerbated. It is also important to understand the weaknesses, limits, but also potential of the student movement, if it is to achieve that potential to the full.

The background: the economic crisis

It should serve as no surprise to anyone that California is the scene for the more numerous, well attended, and concerted actions by the student movement. California is home to three higher education systems: University of California (UC), California State University (CSU) and California Community College-(CCC) with CCC serving as the largest higher education system in the world. These three systems share 160,000[1], 433,000[2] and 3,000,000[3] students respectively - or roughly 10% of the entire population California. The state's severe fiscal crisis, a $20bn deficit - the largest both in the state's history and of any other state in the nation, has resulted in cuts across the state as the government frantically tries to stave off defaulting on loan payments. The situation in California is so severe that top financial leaders like the head of JP Morgan Chase have characterized California's fiscal situation as worse than that of Greece - a country wracked by internal instability and increasingly dire financial woes. This situation has led the Sunshine State to straddle the three higher education systems with increasingly drastic cuts. For the 2009-10 school year, across these three systems there was a total budget cut of $1.7bn - divided among the three systems roughly equally but with each system finding their own ways of adjusting to it. UC and CSU increased their respective tuitions by 30% and have instituted pay cuts and furloughs for their employees, while the CCC campuses are cutting classes, to a point  where students are unable to enroll in classes necessary for transfer or graduation.

This situation is especially toxic when taken in conjunction with the debt that often weighs down graduates from these higher education systems. The California Postsecondary Education Commission, a government institution, stated in 2007 that "rising tuition and fees and increased cost of living are putting a squeeze on lower-income to upper middle-income families, causing students and parents to incur substantial debt."[4] It's notable that this was written in 2007, before the financial crisis and the tailspin the economy has been spiraling in since. At the time of the report, the average debts for graduates from California's higher education systems were $12,459 for four year institutions and $9,214 for two year institutions. That's not the end of the story, however, as often times these loans are further compounded by Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS), which are taken out by parents to pay for their children's education, and which were averaged at $12,066 and $12,742, respectively. This allows for quite a range of debt burden for the multitude of students in the California's education system. On the whole many graduates will leave school already facing interest payments on the loans they accumulate from their years in college, which often adversely affect not just the students but also their families, who take out loans on their behalf.

It is in this framework that the class nature of the cuts to education begins to take shape. The rising cost of education, manifested in the most vulnerable segments of the student population as increasing debt burden, and the budget cuts compounded with that rise are part of the generalized and direct assaults on the working class' living standards. Education functioned for many as a means to achieve a better material condition and the public education system in California was once one of the most accessible. The mechanism of student debt is used to incorporate the student population into the state apparatus and deter radical action. In many ways, today's student loans relegate the student to a modern form of debt slavery and this condition tends to encourage docility. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, it is the working class that is asked to bear the brunt of these austerity measures so as to weather the storm of the capitalist crisis. This is repeated throughout the economy. As the reality of the crisis shatters the rose-tinted glasses of even the most optimistic bourgeois economists, the working class is again called to take the force of the recession through layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts, and cuts to the social wage, as the present assault on public education illustrates.

This situation isn't just limited to the United States. Austerity measures are being called throughout the industrialized world, and public services like education are routinely targeted as avenues for rescuing the ailing capitalist economies. The assault on education in California is directly connected to the attacks against the working class on a global scale. In Greece, a country weighed down with a $419bn debt, Prime Minister George Papandreou has described the economic crisis as a "wartime situation."[5] This has unleashed a new round of massive cuts which the working class has to absorb through increased taxes and deep cuts in public services. This has exacerbated an already volatile social situation within Greece. Their student movement, set off in late 2008 by the police murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, set off a cascade of open confrontations with both the police and, in some cases, the unions. The student demonstrations were not confined to students alone, often reaching into work places and complementing strikes against the increasing attacks against the working class.

Weaknesses and potential of the student movement

Out of this global situation arises the California student movement. The movement is best understood not as a single entity but as a constellation of movements. Although there are many different ideas present in the student movement, many of the student organizers are inevitably inexperienced and often times student actions fall into the camps of labor unions. With the budget cuts directly affecting the constituency of workers on individual campuses, the labor unions are in a power play with individual campus administrations to maintain their heretofore established influence on the campus. Students are mobilized by the labor unions, often through groups on campus promoting supposed "worker-student" solidarity and are then funneled into actions designed to promote a union agenda - hence the popular slogan at student protests "We have the power/What power?/Union power!" Beyond symbolic, and innocuous, protests on individual campuses, the unions and their allies in the student population also promote an electoralist agenda which calls on students to write to their legislatures in Sacramento and lobby for a reversal of the budget cuts. These demands are often framed on a mystified notion of the university and, through the promotion of the union apparatus, derail the class nature of the crisis itself. They ignore the fact both that the State of California is simply unable to provide funding in the face of a massive deficit and that restoring the budgets of the various higher education systems would necessitate cutting from other sectors serving the state's population: this is neither here nor their for the narrow framework of union chauvinism. Spinning off of this framework is a camp of student leaders calling for an empowerment of the unions but through the use of a highly ideological racialized rhetoric which actually seeks to replace class with race. I was recently at an event with proponents of this idea where one of them talked about "reframing the debate in order to understand that anti-blackness gave rise to capital." The rhetorical focus is "anti-blackness," but this is expanded along a hierarchy of the oppressed and is used as a form of analyzing the education crisis as a racial crisis. This framework is incredibly reactionary as it actually exacerbates divisions within the student movement along racial lines. This group is marginal in their numbers but influential insofar as to their ability to tap into divisions fostered by the ruling class for over a century in order to quell class solidarity.

There are, however, students who break free from this and recognize this dichotomy as two bourgeois manifestations fighting over the scraps of an ailing system that extends beyond the university proper. These students function along broadly anarchist/communist lines and favor a variety of tactics often decried by unions and their supporters as being too incendiary. A popular tactic is one of building occupations and various forms of confrontational protest such as attempting to seize highways. An accepted slogan of this camp is "occupy everything, demand nothing" and they are heavily influenced by Situationism. They also draw a certain inspiration from the Greek student struggles in their self-described assault on "commodified life" (though when we consider that the Greek students also described themselves as belonging to the "400 euro generation" - ie those who have to survive on $550 per month - we can only wonder how much access to "commodities" they really have!) Theoretically, this grouping is closest towards grasping the educational crisis as being part of the permanent crisis of capitalism. The foundation of their slogan is that capital cannot afford any concessions, it cannot afford any reforms and therefore what remains is to take over what exists and reorient it for use by all. This group, while very good at getting publicized, is still a very small fraction within the developing student movement.

These divisions run deep and are highly fractious in the increasing momentum of the student movement. A popular organizational form arising on campuses are general assemblies and these have varied in their makeup. Often depending entirely on who put them together, they're dominated by any of the aforementioned camps and it becomes very difficult to make headway into presenting a dissenting opinion. This is again due to the inexperienced nature of the many of the students getting involved in this movement and this allows more seasoned union bureaucrats and their supporters to turn these spaces into platforms for their organizations.

However, many students are increasingly aware of the opportunistic elements within the movement. As the contradictions of capitalist democracy are progressively exposed through the sheer arrogance of its representatives and their inability to make any sort of concession, much of the discussion within the freer general assemblies has moved towards ideas of student-worker solidarity beyond the union and the legislature. A certain ambivalence still exists on the question of strikes and more militant working class action, but there is a noticeable increase in the radicalization of the student population since the March 4 event.

There is an increased interest in reaching out not just to workers but also to high school and middle school students and their teachers. This was successfully pulled off in the Oakland March 4 rally in which upwards of 1000 students walked out of their schools and participated in a rally - many of the speakers had never spoken in public before but they, children really, were yelling into the bullhorn about the destruction of the public education system.[6] There is a lot of potential power within the California student movement because, despite the efforts of those who would derail the class nature of the crisis, there is an increasing number who reject the entire discourse and seek out other explanations. There is a rising understanding that the problem facing students is not a problem of mismanagement, but deep systemic crisis that affects the entire world. 

AS 5/4/10

[1].- www.ucop.edu/sas/sfs/docs/loan_rfp_att_1.pdf [8]

[2] .- www2.calstate.edu [9]

[3] .- www.cccco.edu/Portals/4/News/press_releases/2009/Enrollment_Surge_CCCs_%... [10]

[4].- www.cpec.ca.gov/Agendas/Agenda0709/Item_14.pdf [11]

[5].- news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8546589.stm [12]

[6].-  https://oaklandnorth.net/2010/03/04/oakland-students-and-teachers-turn-out-for-march-4-pickets-disaster-drills/ [13]

At least since the debacle of 2000 Presidential Election, which brought the often incompetent and clumsily bellicose Bush administration into office, Internationalism has often pointed to the increasing difficulty of the U.S. capitalist class  to manipulate its electoral apparatus in order to achieve the optimum political outcome in the interests of the overall national capital.

However, with the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008, the U.S. bourgeoisie at last seemed to have put the Bush years behind it. The new administration was supposed to reinvigorate confidence in the democratic and electoral process, revive the United States' standing in the world arena and enact policies and legislation to address pressing problems facing the national capital, which the Bush administration had either ignored or bungled.

Yet even prior to Obama's electoral victory a new political movement had begun to emerge, determined to derail his election and/or obstruct and ruin his administration should he take power. This movement has evolved today into a self-styled grassroots "alternative" political party: the so-called "Tea Party." In this article, we will review the emergence of the Tea Party during the Presidential campaign and the first year of the Obama administration and attempt to draw some preliminary conclusions about the significance of this movement in the life of the U.S. bourgeoisie.

Originally emanating from the right-wing fringes of the American political spectrum, such as racist white militia groups, hyper-libertarian anti-tax activists, various incarnations of Christian fundamentalists, anti-immigration activists and assorted other extremists, nasty rumors - spread via right wing talk radio and the internet - begin to circulate during the Presidential campaign that Obama was really a Muslim agent, sent to take over the federal government and surreptitiously lead America's capitulation to the terrorists. Other equally ridiculous rumors asserted that Obama's election as President would be illegitimate since he was really born in Indonesia, violating the Constitution's requirement that the President be a "natural born" United States citizen. These bizarre claims of the far right fringe begin to exert a serious weight in the 2008 election campaign, as Republican Party political operatives tacitly encouraged these rumors with the full cooperation of a salacious media.  Despite ample evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii and his numerous proclamations that he was - in fact - a Christian, public opinion polls conducted in the months prior to the election consistently showed a significant percentage of the electorate believing Obama was really a Muslim or a foreign born person ineligible for the Presidency.

As the 2008 election campaign heated up in the summer and fall, these claims were given new life by Republican candidate John McCain's nomination of the far right, libertarian Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. Palin - an often volatile political novice - immediately injected a new round of cutting political rhetoric into the campaign. From the summer up until the election in November, the official Republican line attacked Obama as a "socialist" and a "Marxist," who during his days as a "community activist" in urban Chicago, associated with terrorists from the New Left. Just as the American banking system was collapsing in the wake of the housing market and sub-prime loan debacles, the Presidential campaign was defined by Republican Party operatives' attempts to brand Barack Obama a proponent of "big government socialism"!

However, Obama always enjoyed the determined backing of a very significant fraction of the American ruling class, who had recognized the imperative need for a break with the Bush era. This fraction was aided in its efforts to win over many of the more uncertain elements by the near collapse of the American banking system - just weeks before the election. This changed the campaign debate, giving Obama the ultimate impetus to win the election. The lame duck Bush administration orchestrated a massive federal government bail-out of Wall Street and the banks, which prevented a catastrophic outcome in the short term. However, the bail-outs proved deeply unpopular with the public at large and a "Wall Street vs. Main Street" theme emerged in the Presidential campaign, giving a natural advantage to the Democrat Obama (despite his open support for the bail-outs). Faced with the growing realization that an economic crisis of untold proportions lay ahead, many - who otherwise may have supported McCain and Palin on cultural and social grounds - held their nose and decided to vote for the Democrat and soon to be first "African-American" President.

After the election, the right-wing reaction

While the dominant factions of the bourgeoisie celebrated Obama's victory in November and his stated intention to address many pressing problems facing the U.S. state - such as the nation's arcane health care system, which boasts higher costs and worse outcomes than any other industrialized nation - the right-wing plotted its next move. Within weeks of his inauguration, a new challenge to Obama and the Democrats emerged born of the ideological detritus of the various permutations of anti-Obama rhetoric spewed during the Presidential campaign: the so-called "Tea Party."

The Tea Party boasts of its "grassroots" appeal in its stated intention to oppose the bail out of Wall Street and punish the greedy bankers, while at the same time fighting the growth of the federal government, "pork barrel" spending, increased taxes and the so-called "socialism" and "Marxism" of the new Obama administration. Spurred on by right-wing radio and the internet blogosphere, and even given legitimacy by Republican politicians, including Sarah Palin, the Tea Party - despite its grossly eclectic ideological allegiances - has grown over the last year into a serious political force in American politics.

Tea Party ideology is said to have had a major role in the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate Race in February of 2010, which saw the long time Democratic held seat of Edward "Ted" Kennedy pass into Republican hands and which cost the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Similarly, right-wing Republican political candidates have taken up Tea Party ideological themes in advance of the 2010 Congressional elections. Some Tea Party inspired candidates have launched primary challenges to unseat well-established Republicans, including 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain.

The campaign around ‘health reform'

However, the Tea Party movement is most famous today for the part it played in the political and media circus surrounding Obama's health care "reform" efforts, which has dominated U.S. domestic politics for months. Tea Party inspired demonstrations have taken place across the country, protesting against what they see as a "government takeover" of health care embodied in Obama's plan to force everyone to buy health insurance from private, profit-seeking insurance companies, as well as the plan's overall cost, which they believe will increase the national debt.These demonstrations are often replete with provocative slogans decrying "Obamunism" and stoking fear of legislation that would supposedly create "death panels," through which government bureaucrats would decide when to "pull the plug" on elderly and terminally ill patients. Faced with pressure from the right wing base of the party now dominated by Tea Party ideology, sitting Republican Congressmen and Senators have taken up many Tea Party slogans, calling the health care "reform" legislation, "the loss of freedom" in America.

Now that the health care legislation has passed, Republicans pledge to repeal it at first chance, while grassroots Tea Party activists make death threats against Democratic Congressmen, smash Democratic Party office windows and vow to "resist" legislation they call an "attack on freedom" by "any means necessary."  Meanwhile, Democratic leaders protest the "decline of civility" in politics, excoriate their Republican colleagues for failing to adequately denounce the dangerous rhetoric on the right, and publicly fear for their own safety.  American domestic politics has turned particularly brutal and ugly these days, harkening back to the nastiest days of the 1960s and 70s. While not openly expecting fascism any time soon, one Democratic Congressman has predicted a dangerous turn in American politics, should the Democrats attempt to pass immigration "reform" in the same way they did health care legislation.[1]

So how should the working class and its revolutionary minorities make sense of the tortured evolution of the Tea Party and its highly eclectic, and often contradictory,  ideology?

A good deal of further analysis is needed in order to fully understand the evolution of U.S. politics, the extent to which decomposition has infested the political life of the American bourgeoisie and the complex effect of bourgeois ideological campaigns on working class discontent and resistance. However, it is possible to offer some preliminary analysis of the "Tea Party" phenomenon from a proletarian political perspective and draw some of the implications for the working class struggle against capital.

The Tea Party reflects a very real decomposition of bourgeois ideology in the face of an increasing inability of that class to manage its own political affairs. More and more, faced with the Tea Party to its right, and the infiltration of many Tea Party activists in its ranks, the Republican Party is expressing an extreme right-wing ideology that seeks to eviscerate the federal government, devolving power back to the state level. This ideology is strongly opposed to Keynesian economic politics in order to address the crisis, including extending unemployment benefits to displaced workers.

While this ideology has a long history in the life of the U.S. bourgeoisie, going back to the Civil War and the debate on slavery (or even further, since the emphasis on "states' rights" goes back to the foundation of the Republic), today it is completely incompatible with the United States' role as the lone remaining imperialist superpower and the needs of the national state to implement policies to manage the ever deepening economic crisis.[2] Although previously this ideology may have been deployed strategically by elements of the Republican Party to achieve immediate political goals with no intention of carrying them to their conclusion, this right-wing ideology is increasingly assuming its own autonomous character, despite the immediate practical needs of the national state.

To a certain extent, U.S. domestic politics is becoming "ideologized" in a way that negatively impacts the ability of the state to effectively manage the interests of the national capital. This reflects both the deepening difficulty of the U.S. state in the international arena, as well increasing social decomposition shown in the "everyman for himself" approach to social and political life and the flourishing of backward looking  ideologies typified by the Christian right and the Tea Party movement.[3]

Despite the reality of the Tea Party as a political force and its infection of the Republican Party, the U.S. bourgeoisie - through its media apparatus - is perfectly capable of exploiting this movement in a number of ways to defuse working class discontent over the deepening economic crisis. First, the constant media images of enraged Tea Party rallies where supporters proudly wear t-shirts and carry placards adorned with colorful phrases, such as "Marxism is an Obamanation" and "I Didn't Vote for Socialism," simply continue the long ideological campaign against Marxism, communism and the working class movement that once identified them with Stalinist totalitarianism. Today, the campaign identifies Marxism with Obama's Keynesian state capitalist policies. The goal here is to associate proletarian politics with state capitalism and corporate giveaways so as to divert the working class away from its own class terrain and toward a simplistic attack on the "state" in the name of a mythologized primordial American "liberty" emanating from the days of the Revolution of 1776.

Second, and complementary to the first goal, the media campaign around the Tea Party seeks to stoke fear in those who reject their ideology, but who remain angry and concerned about the economic crisis. The goal here is to enroll these workers around a defense of the federal state, state capitalist policies, democratic ideology and a now under siege Obama administration, supposedly threatened from an increasingly violent, racist and utterly irrational proto-fascist tendency within the Tea Party.

In short, whether the Tea Party is presented as a dire threat or a positive force for freedom, workers are going to be called on to take sides in an increasingly bitter struggle between factions of the bourgeoisie which, in historical terms, are equally anti-working class and reactionary. This is a dangerous trap which can only be sprung by workers developing their struggles.[4]

With its fervent individualism, anti-welfare and anti-immigrant sentiment, Tea Party ideology is essentially a rejection of social solidarity, which is the life blood of the working class fighting  on its own class terrain, in defense of  its own living and working standards.[5] This alone can provide the necessary antidote to all  the ideological poison emanating from this dying social system. 

Henk 10/4/10

[1].- House Democratic Majority Whip, James Clyburn (Democrat, South Carolina) on "Hardball With Chris Matthews" MSNBC. March 24th, 2009.

[2].- Although an argument could be made that the Republicans rhetoric about the national debt reflects a very real growing realization within the bourgeoisie that Keynesian tactics, though they may provide a short term relief, only dig a deeper grave for the national economy in the longer term.

[3].- We should be careful to not overstate this phenomenon. Despite the fact that not a single Republican voted for the legislation, the state was still able to push through health care "reform" by alternative parliamentary procedures, avoiding the prospect of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Moreover, despite the opposition of the particularly grumpy Republican Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky, the state has found a way to push through a series of last minute "miracle" extensions of unemployment benefits (charged of course on the national credit card!).

[4].- Ironically, despite their vitriol against "socialism" and "government run health care," many Tea Party supporters actually receive coverage through Medicare, leading to the odd sight of protesters carrying banners reading, "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare."  

[5].-  Consequently, a large part of the media campaign regarding the Tea Party is to identify social solidarity, compassion and empathy for others with the state, as if only a strong state can safeguard these values against the threat emanating from an increasingly belligerent and sociopathic right-wing.

The year 2010 is the 90th anniversary of the presidential campaign of Federal Prisoner 9653, Eugene Debs, and in anticipation of the ruling class' efforts to distort the historical contributions of Debs, we wanted to take a few moments to set the record straight.

A central element in the ruling class ongoing efforts to prevent the development of a class conscious working class movement is to hide or distort the real history of the working class, a history that has always been characterized by  a struggle to resist oppression and exploitation. Back in the 1970's the arch-conservative labor leader, George Meany tried to rehabilitate Debs by deleting any reference to his revolutionary politics and depicting him as well meaning idealist, reformer, and pacifist who was misguided about World War I and defended an outmoded notion of class struggle. Furthering the distortion of Debs' legacy, last year,  the Eugene Debs Foundation in Terre Haute, Indiana presented its annual award to Ron Gettlefinger, the president of the United Auto Workers , who they claimed "has been reasonable successful, although fighting against overwhelming odds, to protect the wages and benefits of UAW members, active and retired," as if someone who cooperated with the ruling class' restructuring of the auto industry and destruction of thousands of jobs somehow personified the political principles of Eugene Debs.

The staff writers at the AFL-CIO's official web site apparently worked around the clock to concoct an image of Debs as the ideological architect of the New Deal. "Although none of his dreams were realized during his lifetime, Debs inspired millions to believe in ‘the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind,' and he helped spur the rise of industrial unionism and the adoption of progressive social and economic reforms

What we see is the concert effort to transform Debs, a revolutionary internationalist, a militant who lived and breathed the class struggle and transform into a good-natured reformer, a moralists and pacifist and thereby rob the working class of part of its revolutionary legacy.

The underlying premise of Debs' activity was the Marxist understanding the "there is nothing in common between the exploiting and exploited classes; that there is in truth a conflict between them old as the centuries and this conflict must continue with ever-increasing education and organization on the part of the working class until they developed the power, economic, political and otherwise, to abolish the prevailing system and establish the world-wide industrial democracy and commonwealth of comrades (Letter of Acceptance, American Soicialist, April 2, 1916).

In 1977 when AFL-CIO leader George Meany received the Eugene Victor Debs award he declared that the current union movement is a blend of the "social idealism of Debs and the pragmatic trade unionism of Samuel Gompers, the founding leader of the American Federation of Labor, washing away in a single sentence one the bitterest political disputes in the history of the workers movement in the United States. Debs once wrote that

 "Wall Street does not fear Sammy Gompers and the AFof L...Every plutocrat, every profiteering pirate, every food vulture, every exploiter of labor, ever robber and oppressor of the poor, every hog under a silk ties, every vampire in human form, will tell that the AF of L under Gompers is a great and patriotic organization..." IWW Bogey, International Socialist Review, `February 1918).

On an another occasion, Debs wrote in reference to Gompers:

"the trade union under its present leadership and as now used, is more beneficial to the capitalist class than it is to the workers, seeing that it is the means of keeping them disunited and pitted against each other and as an inevitable result, in wage slavery." (Working Class Politics, International Socialist Review, November, 1910.

It comes as no surprise of course that the biggest distortion of Deb's legacy comes in regard to his opposition to World War I. The Debs Foundation web site says only that " in 1918 Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning the U.S. entry into World War I."  Debs didn't "question" the war; he opposed it, denounced it, affirmed that the workers had no country to fight for and called for the working class to unleash a revolutionary struggle.

In response to a letter from novelist Upton Sinclair, who like many other adherents of the Second International, betrayed the working class and rallied to the flag of the national bourgeoisies during WW I, Debs wrote:

"Any kind of any army that may be organized...under the present government will be controlled by the ruling class, and its chief function will be to keep the working class in slavery." He also wrote, "The workers have no country to fight for. It belongs to the capitalists and plutocrats. Let them worry over its defense, And when they declare wars as they and they alone do....let them also go out and slaughter each other."

On another occasion, Debs wrote:

 "I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist...I am opposed to every war but one: I am for that war with heart and sould and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in anyway the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades." (Appeal to Reason, September 11, 1915.

In his analysis of World War I, Debs wrote:

 "It should not be overlooked that this frightful upheaval is but a symptom of the internal readjustment which the underlying economic forces are bring about, as well as of the fundamental changes which are being wrought in our industrial and political institutions...Permanent peace, however, peace based upon social justice will never prevail until national industrial despotism has been supplanted by international industrial democracy.  The end of profit and plunder among nations wil also mean the end of war and the dawning of the era of ‘Peace on Earth and Good Will Among Men.'" (Prospect for Peace, American Socialist, February19, 1916.

Debs recognized that WW I marked a crucial turning point in the development of world capitalism and the workers revolution was the order of the day. In the Canton, Ohio speech for which was sentenced to 10 years in prison, he not only attacked the war and praised other revolutionaries who had spoken out against the war, but also expressed solidarity the Russian Revolution, hailing it as the dawn of a new world. In an article written in 1919, after the uprising  by the German proletariat, Debs wrote:

"The reign of capitalism and militarism has made of all peoples inflammable material. They are ripe and ready for the change, the great change which means the rise and triumph of the workers, the end of exploitation, of war and plunder and the emancipation of the [human] race.

"In Russia and Germany our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution; which knows no race, no color; no sex and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for world-wide emulation. Let us like the, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and deny the robber -class power and fight on that line to victory or death.

"From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik and proud of it." The Day of the People, Class Struggle, Feburary 1919.)

Debs was far from perfect. Some of his political shortcomings were the inevitable result of the period in which he lived. The workers movement itself still had many lessons to learn as capitalism entered its decadent phase.  Debs tended to equate nationalization with socialism, a mistake he shared with many revolutionaries of the period. But other misconceptions reflected his own personal difficulties to recognize the changing class lines that came with capitalist decadence. While he recognized profound historical changes were occurring in the world with the advent of the world imperialist war and supported the Russian Revolution as the first step in  the world revolution, he could not bring himself to break with the Socialist Party or see the need for the formation of a communist party. He did not clearly understand that the era of reform had ended and that unions had crossed to the other side of the class line. Any conception of workers councils is missing from his writings and he was unclear on the relationship between party and class.

But on the  key issue of imperialist war, Debs was true to the principles of proletarian internationalism. He spoke out against workers slaughtering workers for the bourgeoisie. On this issue he took the same stance as Lenin and Luxemburg, and for this he went to prison, under the Espionage and Sedition acts for these words:

"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke.... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles." (The Canton, Ohio Anti-war Speech, June 16, 1918)

Debs was no stranger to the inside of a prison cell. During forty years in the workers movement, he spent nearly four years behind bars. An inmate of three county jails, one state prison, and a federal penitentiary, what kept him going was his passionate commitment to and confidence in the working class. Shortly before his death, Debs wrote:

"Often at night in my narrow prison quarters when all about me was quiet, I beheld as in a vision, the majestic march of events in the transformation of the world.

"I saw the working class in which I was born and reared, and to whom I owe my all, engaged in the last great conflict to break the fetters that have bound them ages, and to stand forth, as last, emancipated from every servitude, the sovereighn ruler of the world.

"It was this vision that sustained me in the hour of my imprisonment." (Walls and Bars, 1926).

While imprisoned in federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Debs refused every privilege offered by authorities to him as a prominent political prisoner and spoke out against the mistreatment of his fellow inmates. In 1920, he ran for the fifth time as the Socialist candidate for president, running as Federal Prisoner 9653 and received nearly 1 million votes without ever setting foot outside the prison. His 10 year sentence for speaking out against the war was commuted by President Warren G. Harding at Christmas 1921.  " On the day of his release, the warden ignored prison regulations and opened every cell-block to allow more than 2,000 inmates to gather in front of the main jail building to say good-bye to Eugene Debs. As he started down the walkway from the prison, a roar went up and he turned, tears streaming down his face, and stretched out his arms to the other prisoners. (Howard Zinn, Eugene V. Debs, and the Idea of Socialism, Progressive, Jan 1999).   

 J. Grevin 15/01/10 (based on an earlier article published in Internationalism 13)